Thursday, July 18, 2002

Debut of a CD-ROM Series Features a Professor Who Fights for Hawaiian Sovereignty By BROCK READ The Hawaiian-sovereignty movement is little known in the continental United States, but the cause is at a crucial juncture, according to Haunani-Kay Trask, a professor of Hawaiian studies at the University of Hawaii-Manoa who co-founded Ka Lahui Hawai'i, an organization supporting Hawaiian secession. Ms. Trask argues that a number of factors -- including widespread emigration, rising housing costs, and lawsuits threatening federal entitlements for native Hawaiians -- make the case for sovereignty a strong one. Now the professor and activist is the subject of a CD-ROM that she hopes will bolster the movement and provide political scientists with food for thought. We Are Not Happy Natives: Education and Decolonization in Hawai'i (in-D, 2002) explores her views on Hawaii's culture and political future -- and her theories of teaching and the role of the university -- through interviews, essays, and an assortment of additional information. The disk can be purchased for $24.95 through the marginX Web site. The disk -- the first in a planned series -- was designed and compiled by John Kikuo Shishido, who founded and directs marginX, a project that aims to create electronic archives representing the careers of intellectuals known for political activism. "We're just trying to record historical memory as it gets down to the level of individual educators," Mr. Shishido says of the project. Mr. Shishido was familiar with Ms. Trask's work when he met her at a lecture she delivered in the late 1990s at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, where Mr. Shishido studied. When he started the marginX project, in 2000, he decided that the professor would be a natural fit for the series' pilot CD-ROM. "We wanted to take a look at an educator who's talking about colonization and native issues," he says. The disk is anchored by a series of video clips taken from an interview Mr. Shishido conducted with Ms. Trask. While watching segments of the interview, users can read definitions of key terms; they can also view such resources as excerpts from Ms. Trask's essays and speeches, syllabuses from the courses she leads, and fliers and other memorabilia from her activism. In the video clips, Ms. Trask discusses her academic influences, the history of the Hawaiian-sovereignty movement, and the problems that she sees facing the state today. But she places a special emphasis on her views of teaching and the role of the university. Ms. Trask argues that today's college has become "only a training ground, not a locus of struggle," and that professors must encourage students to enter university governments. The focus on pedagogy was the idea of Mr. Shishido, who wants his series of CD-ROM's to focus on higher education's role in shaping politics and society. "A lot of people who know these leftist intellectuals are not really aware that they're teachers," he says. Mr. Shishido applied his concept to the disk's design. The interview clips are divided into four sections -- "Context," "Theory," "Practice," and "Reflection" -- that, Mr. Shishido says, constitute the framework of what he considers progressive, critical education. Ms. Trask says that, after seeing the CD-ROM, she has started to incorporate it into her courses and lectures. Mr. Shishido "did me and my students a great favor by capturing what it is that I believe and why it's important for my people to understand their situation," she says. Both Ms. Trask and Mr. Shishido expect that the disk will reach a wider audience -- within academe and beyond -- than Ms. Trask's books about Hawaiian history and the sovereignty movement. "I'm hoping it will give educators a little spark to think about how their educational praxis affects what they do," says Ms. Trask. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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